It's the middle of 2024 and I find myself in a weird place. As I've said previously, I really do not like Souls games. And yet this year I keep finding myself enjoying Souls games. What a time to be alive!
Jedi Survivor? I loved it. Lies of P? Cool game! The Crab Game? Also excellent. I am now adding Flintlock to that list, a game I hadn't even properly heard of until last week, but which, despite its relative obscurity for me and its genre, has well and truly got me.
Yeah, it’s a Soulslike, so there are fundamentals that every game with that label shares. You rest at spots that reset enemies, there's concentration required for even the most mundane opponent, there are gruelling boss fights, devilish combos, upgrade trees and, most importantly, gross dead guys to kill.
All of which I could take or leave, to be honest, because like I've said I'm not a Souls guy! But I can tolerate them if the wider setting and context is worth it, and just like it was with force-blasting stormtroopers off cliffs and giving a little crab a huge gun, the setting and context of Flintlock was very much worth it for me.
Flintlock--I can't believe a game hasn't used that name already--is set in a fantasy world where humanity fights to hold back the hordes of the undead. The catch is that the ones holding them back aren't sword-wielding medieval types (though the game does feature them), but 19th-century soldiers. Imagine the US Civil War, or the Franco-Prussian War, just against...zombies. Trenches line the landscape, cannons are aimed at the gates of hell and humanity's first line of defence are wearing backpacks and firing muskets.
I like it! It's a fresh take on not just the setting but the combat as well, as Flintlock pairs a firearm and melee weapon about as well as any fantasy game ever has, from Fable to Dishonored. Much of the game's combat is built around juggling both of your weapons’ strengths and weaknesses, like your flintlock being able to blast at enemies from a distance, but then can only be reloaded by engaging in a certain amount of melee action.
Rounding out a trinity of powers is the help you get from a tiny little god, who is along for the ride and to help you kill much bigger gods by sharing some of his powers with you. Switching between your multiple means of attack, as well as having to constantly block, evade and parry keeps every encounter interesting.
Anyway, enough of the standard impressions stuff. What I really want to say about this game is that from the second you fire it up, it's clear that despite its best attempts, this is definitely not a AAA experience, at least as we have come to expect from 2024.
Yet it feels like one from a bygone era, something from a decade ago. It looks great, has a well-developed style, sharp visuals, quality writing and voice acting (including regular lines from Adam Jensen's Elias Toufexis). Even the menus are slick. You could have told me this was a centrepiece game at E3 2016 on the PlayStation stage and I would have believed you without hesitation.
Please know this is not a bad thing. In 2024, it still looks and plays just fine. I found myself playing Flintlock at the same time I was replaying Wolfenstein: New Order--an actual AAA game from a decade ago--and comparing the two, and the amount of fun I was having with both, I just kept thinking this is all I need. This is all video games need to be.
I know this is a topic I've already touched on this year while battling my way through half the Call of Duty series, but I want to repeat it here: the absurd amounts of time, money and manpower being spent on modern AAA video games are unsustainable, and worse, not even worth it. What we've long suspected--and had pretty much confirmed by the sums revealed in the Insomniac dump--is that the diminishing returns of the fidelity arms race are going to end up killing every studio until the only blockbuster developers left are Rockstar and whoever is still standing to make a Call of Duty game.
As a sports fan, and also a games writer pondering the death spiral much of the industry finds itself in, Flintlock's suitability got me thinking: what if video games had a salary cap? What if games had a finite amount of resources that could be spent on them, instead of the gaping, fiery maw that AAA budgets currently look like? A ceiling that would curb the rampant excess currently driving studios to the wall, and force more imaginative thinking from publishers (thinking that, to their credit, Nintendo settled on years ago). What if Activision, instead of trying to recreate Claudia Doumit in digital form, had to actually do something original and interesting with Call of Duty?
Please note I'm not actually suggesting this. It's just a thought exercise, brought about by playing these two games at the same time. Trying to implement such a thing would lead to much the same behind-the-scenes fuckery that we see in sports, replacing one set of labour and financial issues with new ones.
But my point is that if there was a salary cap, it should be set at whatever it cost to make Flintlock. We don't need anything more than this.
I wish--and fans of Lies of P or Plague Tale or Blood West or any other AA games will say the same thing--there were more games like this! Flintlock had restrictions on its resources, sure, but it picked a genre, had a vision and executed it as best it could. It doesn't matter that it doesn't have the latest in next-gen visuals or a $150 million marketing budget. It didn't need a huge open world, or to feature lifelike facial animations. I just wanted to sit down last week and play a cool video game-ass video game, and Flintlock delivered.
